The Divine Miss M, Bette Midler, will undertake her first major tour in more than a decade beginning May 8 in Hollywood, Fla. at the 5,500-seat Hard Rock Live, according to her website.

The tour makes two southern California stops on May 28 at the Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles and the following night at the Honda Center in Anaheim.

The 68-year-old three-time Grammy Award-winning star’s latest album, “It’s the Girls,” came out Nov. 4. The album, her first in eight years, is a tribute to pop music’s girl groups and includes covers of The Ronette’s “Be My Baby,” The Supreme’s “You Can’t Hurry Love” and “Bei Mir Bist du Schon” by The Andrews Sisters, the trio that Midler brought back into the limelight when she covered their WWII hit, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in 1973. All concertgoers on this tour will receive complimentary copies of the album.

Kinks West End musical extended

“Sunny Afternoon,” which tells the tale of the early life of The Kinks’ leader Ray Davies in London’s Muswell Hill district, is a smash. The musical has been extended at the West End (London’s Broadway) Harold Pinter Theatre a second time. It will now run an additional six months, until May 23. It initially ran earlier this year at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Each of the songs in the production, including “Lola” and “Waterloo Sunset,” were written by Davies.

Alan Jackson Most Performed Country Artist

ASCAP, the nonprofit performance rights organization that protects musical copyrights, named Alan Jackson The Most Performed Country Songwriter-Artist of the Last Century at its 52nd Annual ASCAP Country Music Awards on Monday night in Nashville. From 1989 through this year, 57 of the 60 singles the 56-year-old hit Billboards Top 40 country singles chart with 36 of them hitting No. 1, including “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” “Chattahoochie,” and his most recent No. 1 45, “Country Boy,” in 2008.

Bob Dylan’s complete Basement Tapes out

Portions of Bob Dylan’s fabled so-called Basement Tapes have been released over the years, including a legitimate 1976 2-LP of the same name that saw The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson and his group overdub a considerable amount (as well as include several Band-only cuts) and on bootlegs, i.e., illegal album not released by the record company or artist (1969’s “The Great White Wonder” was considered the first bootleg album).

On Nov 4, for the first time, all 138 songs Dylan and The Band (they were known as both The Hawks and The Crackers at the time) recorded over the summer and fall of 1967 in the basement of a small house in West Saugerties, near Woodstock, that they called “Big Pink,” have been released in one 6-CD box set. “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11” is a treasure trove for Dylan aficionados as it contains 30 songs that most never even knew existed, including “Wild Wolf” that Rolling Stone described as “an epic, apocalyptic rocker.”

After the sessions ended, Dylan, who was into an eight-year period of intense seclusion after a July 1966 motorcycle accident in which it’s been speculated that he broke his neck, sent 14 of the session’s songs that were intended as demos to a few musicians and music publishers in the hopes that they’ll be covered. From this, England’s Manfred Mann scored a Top 10 hit with “Quinn the Eskimo,” while Peter, Paul and Mary hit No. 35 with “Too Much of Nothing” and Dylan’s pals, The Byrds, recorded “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” that received airplay in the earliest days of FM “underground” radio.

Gregg Allman sets solo tour

Gregg Allman waited less than a week after his now-former group, The Allman Brothers Band, played its last show ever, on Oct. 28 at the Beacon Theatre in New York, to announce a solo tour of the South.

Backed by an eight-piece band that includes three horns, the 66-year-old singer-keyboard player kicks off his 11-date tour on New Year’s Eve at Symphony Hall in Atlanta. The tour includes two-night stands in early January at Atlanta’s Georgia Theatre, Macon, Georgia’s Grand Opera House and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville before wrapping in Savannah, Georgia on Jan. 17 at the Johnny Mercer Theatre.

X and Blaster holiday tour

Veteran L.A. punk outfits X and The Blaster will undertake a joint holiday “Family X-Mas Tour” of the American West that begins Dec. 5 at the Rialto Theatre in Tucson. Before coming to a halt on Dec. 26-27 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, the groups that were major influences on the punk and new rockabilly movement during the ‘80s will stop at the Casbah in San Diego on Dec. 11, the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Dec. 12 and at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills on Dec. 13.

Graham Nash on the Neil Young-David Crosby feud

First, Neil Young and then David Crosby both said that their supergroup with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills would never perform or record together again. Nash has now chimed in on the feud. In an interview on the Ron and Fez show on SiriusXM radio, a hopeful Nash remains optimistic that CSNY will fly again.

It all began when Crosby called Young’s new girlfriend, actress Daryl Hannah, “a purely poisonous predator” in an interview with the Idaho Statesmen. Young then told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show that a CSNY reunion, “Will never happen. Not in a million years.” Crosby refused to apologize, tweeting that he had “no regrets” regarding his claim.

Nash told the radio hosts, “It would be sad to me if the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young didn’t go forward because of an inappropriate statement by David to Neil about his relationship with Daryl Hannah. If we’re not more grown up and if we’re not more realistic about what the true value of our friendship is, it would be very sad to me.”

“It would be sad to me if the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young didn’t go forward because of an inappropriate statement by David to Neil about his relationship with Daryl Hannah,” he said. “If we’re not more grown up and if we’re not more realistic about what the true value of our friendship is, it would be very sad to me.”

The last time CSNY performed together was at Young’s Bridge School Benefit at the Bay Area’s Shoreline Amphitheatre in October last year.

Steve Smith writes a new Classic Pop, Rock and Country Music News column every week. Contact him by email at Classicpopmusicnews@gmail.com.

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